Parishat
lev 21
It is curious that we don’t see the intensity behind the story of the Samaritan that Yeshua told.
Here we see the previous reading contained the command Love your neighbor as your self. And now this week we see the priestly rules. Don’t touch any dead except close kin. Not even your sister unless she is unwed. Touching causes defilement and uncleanness and the inability to do one’s duties for 7 days as a priest or Levite.
This harms the community at large should a priest become unclean on the way to temple. Thus what is going on is a hierarchy question when Yeshua is asked concerning the great commandments. Yet Yeshua creates a hierarchy. Rabbi Hillel 100 years before Yeshua said the two greatest commandments were love HaShem and love your neighbor as yourself but others disagreed as is the Jewish way. Rabbi Shamai said it was to love God and keep Shabbat. If a priest, hypothetically stopped on his way to Shabbat temple service and touched a dead person then he would have broken Shabbat as being unable to perform the Shabbat cleansings because he touched a dead person not his kin in accordance with chapter 21.
So Yeshua is essentially saying, I am in the hierarchy school of Hillel and I want to go a bit deeper and tell you that being in the school of Hillel means more than head knowledge. If the opportunity to help someone is presented, as in this story, where the poor man looks as if he is dead, then loving one’s neighbor outweighs becoming ceremonially unclean. The one sheep lost has greater needs than the 99 that are together and safe. The logical order of Leviticus has "chapter" 19 before 21. So was Yeshua and Hillel correct? Do the needs of the one outweigh the needs of the 99 sheep?
This is a difficult concept. The author Charles Martin in his trilogy of the Water Keeper, stated this principal over and over! The Shepherd leaves the 99 to help the one sheep that is lost. Therefore the needs of the one lost sheep outweigh the needs of the 99 sheep that can take care of themselves. The needs of the poor almost dead man outweigh the needs of the cleansing. Why? Because the system allows for other priests and Levites or sheep “to pick up the slack.”
However, no one is available to care for the almost dead man on the road except the proverbial me and you. Yeshua is not juxtaposing bad Jew for good Samaritan. Amy Jill Levine makes sure we understand this in her book "Short Stories by Jesus". This has been used over and over for thousands of years to say "legalism is bad and inferior compared to the superior goodness of gracefulness and compassion. If you are saying that you have totally missed the point. The point is again the needs of the one outweigh the needs of the 99.
This is about hierarchy. In the moment, what do you do when two laws conflict? This is the principal: is the need greater? Are there alternatives? Was it wrong for the priest and the Levite to obey Lev 21 over Lev 19? This is the wrong question? Because Shamai would say no! They honored their commitment to the community. But Hillel and Yeshua would say “the one is more important.”
I am of the Yeshua Hillel school but that doesn’t mean being of the Shamai school of thought wrong, or like some, call it a sin. That would be a misreading the context and ultimately the text itself. What do you think about this tension? Try to put yourself in the shoes of the priest going up to temple on a dangerous road knowing full well that touching the dead body would cause you to not be able to help and show love to the community of 99 that need cleansing.